In a startling disclosure yesterday at a Kennedy School of Government conference, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released documents providing a top-secret analysis of Soviet military policy and ballistic missile forces as well as an entirely new look at the Cold War.

The CIA said the documents are the most sensitive information ever made public by the agency. The 494 pages of files released thus far span three decades of National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), from 1954 to 1983.

The documents show that U.S. intelligence analysts believed throughout the Cold War that Soviet nuclear weapons were not designed for a direct attack on the United States. In addition, during the 1950s the CIA accurately predicted a Soviet build-up in long-range missiles but underestimated the size of the increase, according to the documents.

The CIA released several hundred Soviet intelligence files on mainly non-strategic matters last year following a 1992 initiative by former CIA Director Robert Gates to review all intelligence estimates on the Soviet Union that were at least 10 years old.

But according to former CIA officer Raymond L. Garthoff, who himself wrote some of the newly available estimates, "these [documents released today] were considered on the whole to be more sensitive."

CIA Director R. James Woolsey officially declassified the National Intelligence Estimates (NIE's) on November 16 in preparation for yesterday's conference, which was attended by more than 100 intelligence officials and scholars.

Harvard's Warren Center for Studies in American History and the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence co-sponsored the conference.

The intelligence estimates chronicle a time that saw satellite technology vastly change the nature of CIA analysis.

"After satellites we were no longer estimating what they [the Soviets] had, we were estimating what they would have," former CIA official Richard Lehman said in an interview yesterday.

This new batch of 80 declassified documents--70 of which will not be available until January--is being released "with some excisions," according to J. Kenneth McDonald, chief of the CIA's history staff.

Omitted from the documents are specific estimates of the number and destructive force of Soviet missiles.

The conference yesterday consisted of panel discussions by intelligence officials and journalists. Key topics were the evolution of intelligence estimates and the media perspective of intelligence activities.

There was substantial criticism of the documents. Lawrence K. Gershwin, a national intelligence officer, said many of the estimates failed to show an understanding of communist society and government.

"One of our problems was that our analysts did not have a specifically Red perspective," he said.

A much harsher criticism of CIA officers came from Nicholas Daniloff, director of the Northwestern School of Journalism and former Moscow Bureau Chief for U.S. News and World Report.

Intelligence officers he encountered, Daniloft said, seemed "woefully naive" and demonstrated a "fantastic lack of knowledge of that country [the Soviet Union]."

Randall Forsberg, director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, told the crowd that the documents left her with an impression of "an institutional bias toward worst-case scenarios."

Documents indicate a struggle by analysts to quantify Soviet deployment of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) that continued from the late 1950's through the 1970's.

"Soviet ICBM deployment programs have followed an uneven course marked by spurts of activity, long pauses, and abrupt cutbacks of what initially appeared to be large-scale program," an October 1965 intelligence estimate concludes.

Even with this unprecedented release of information, Forsberg charged that the agency continues to maintain secrecy "vastly in excess of national security needs."

"I feel that the information available to citizens is woefully inadequate," Forsberg said.

In response, Gershwin said the intelligence community has to balance the public's right to know with the country's national security interests.

"We may be damned if we do and damned if we don't," Gershwin said. "I'm not sure which way we'd rather be damned."

"We were operating against a society that made an effort to deny us and deceive us," added Roy Godson, an associate professor of government at Georgetown and author of numerous intelligence-related articles.

Other newly declassified estimates include "Main Trends in Soviet Military Policy" and "Strength and Deployment of Soviet Long Range Ballistic Missile Forces."

Today's panel discussions will feature former CIA Director Robert Gates '64 and McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard professor and a former special assistant to the president for national security affairs